The costs associated with fraud are rapidly increasing every year. It is common to employ some type of identity verification to combat fraud. Thus, for example, merchants frequently require persons writing checks to provide a government-issued identification so that the signature on the check can be compared to the signature on the government-issued identification and the picture on the government issued identification can be compared to the person presenting the check. Although this works quite well for verifying in-person transactions, it does not work for other types of transactions, such as online transactions, telephonic transactions, and in-person automated transactions.